A Star Fox Zero Animated Short Will Be Releasing This Week, Get The Details

Nintendo has teamed up with animation studio Production I.G., and WIT Studio for an animated short based on the upcoming release of Star Fox Zero, which is due to drop later this week, exclusively for the Wii U.

Game Informer is reporting that legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto has been lending his creativity in the design and animation space to the production crew working on the animated short. Nintendo released a short teaser today featuring a quick 45 second look at the upcoming animated film. You can check it out below.

You won't have to wait long to see the full thing, as it's scheduled to release via live-stream on Nintendo's official website starting April 20th, 3pm PST, 6pm EST. The name of the short is caleld Star Fox Zero: The Battle Begins.

The trailer only features the theme of Star Fox with some short clips and snippets from the animated feature. The visuals are actually pretty cool, and it makes me wonder why they didn't utilize that kind of art-style for Star Fox Zero?

The cel-shaded 3D models made to look like sprites gives the short film a really distinct look. That's not to mention that Star Fox seems like it could be ripe for a short run television series, assuming that's something Nintendo wants to pursue.

But getting back to the art-style... the current game coming out for the Wii U later this week has been criticized by long-time fans as being just an upgraded version of the N64 release from years ago. It's hard to argue against that point when you look at the gameplay footage and recognize that the shaders aren't entirely impressive and the aesthetic is rather drab. That's not to take anything away from Star Fox Zero's actual gameplay design, but sometimes visuals can help turn a mediocre game into a good game, and a good game into a great game. There's really no better example of this than with Limbo, which was a decent platformer made all the more enthralling thanks to the silhouette art-style.

Maybe for the next Star Fox game they release on the Nintendo NX we'll get to see them utilizing the same kind of visual techniques they're using in the short film above.

As mentioned at the top of the article, fans of the space-ace fox will be able to check out Star Fox Zero: The Battle Begins this Wednesday on April 20th. This will arrive just ahead of the game's full launch on April 22nd.

The latest entry in the arcade-flyer series will also launch with Star Fox Guard bundled into the package, so you can look forward to that as well. This week will definitely offer Star Fox fans a lot of multimedia to consume.